The first one was an accident.
It was my second week at the Broken Antler. A Thursday, a little after eight, the breakfast rush packed in tight: every stool taken, every booth full, the door bell ringing so often it had stopped being a sound and turned into weather. I was getting better. I could carry three plates now if I didn't think about it too hard. I knew the regulars' orders before they sat down. I knew which booths wobbled and which coffeemaker ran hot.
Manny, the cook, was singing. Manny was always singing. That morning it was something slow and sad in Spanish about a woman who'd left on a train, and he was flipping six pancakes at once with a spatula in each hand like a man conducting an orchestra.
Then the grease on the flattop popped, and the spatula slipped, and his whole left hand went flat against the steel.
The sound he made was not a word in any language.
Everything stopped. Sari spun around with a coffeepot. Clay came out of the back at a run. Manny was hunched over, clutching his wrist, his face gone gray, his hand held out in front of him like it belonged to someone else. Already the skin across his palm was angry and red, the white beginning to bubble up in patches.
"Ice," Clay was saying, "Sari, ice, get the—"
I was closer.
I didn't decide. I want to be clear about that. There was no moment where I weighed it up. I was simply at Manny's side, and I had his wrist in my hands, the way Ithra had taught me with the sparrow a thousand years ago. Feel where it wants to be whole.
His pain hit me like heat off an open oven. I knew its shape instantly. The burned layers. The nerves screaming. The little vessels swelling and leaking. And under it, the healthy skin, waiting, knowing exactly what it was supposed to be.
Then let it.
Warmth went out of my palms. Not the hot, angry heat of the burn, but something gentle, spreading, the way sunlight spreads across a floor in the morning. I felt it move into him. I felt the blistering slow. Stop. I felt the skin begin, quietly, to remember itself.
It wasn't instant. Healing never is, not in a body. It takes the time it takes. But it would be enough.
"Hey," Manny said, sounding confused. "Hey. Eva. What—"
"Cold water," I said. My voice came out steady. I don't know how. "Keep it under cold water. Don't touch it."
Sari shoved a bowl of ice water at him. He plunged his hand in, swearing in two languages. Clay hovered. Somebody at the counter asked if he needed a doctor.
By the time the rush was over, the red had faded to pink. By lunch, Manny was flexing his fingers and frowning at them.
"Guess it wasn't as bad as it looked," he said, and shrugged, and went back to singing.
Sari didn't say anything. But she looked at Manny's hand for a long time. And then she looked at me.
* * *
That night I lay awake upstairs with my heart going like a hummingbird's.
Nothing had happened. That was the thing. No lightning. No Elder appearing in the doorway with her silver wings and her disappointed face. No Writ. No list. Just a man's hand, burned, and then not burned. Just Manny singing again.
I held my palms up in the dark and looked at them.
I'd done it. Without permission. Without anyone's name on anything.
I started to laugh, quietly, into my pillow, and I couldn't stop.
* * *
After that, I stopped being careful.
I'd like to say I was wise about it, that I chose the people I healed with thought and prayer and long consideration. I wasn't. I was a girl who'd been starving for six hundred years, suddenly set loose in a bakery.
Gary Pell came in the next Monday. He was one of the regulars, a big, red-faced man around sixty who drove a log truck for Haskell Lumber and always ordered the chicken-fried steak even though, Sari told me, his doctor had begged him not to. He sat in his usual booth, and when I brought his coffee, I saw the sweat on his upper lip. I saw his hand pressed flat against his sternum.
The chapter at www.NovelPhoenix.com is the author's publication; this copy was taken without their approval.
"Just heartburn," he said, waving me off. "Bad onions last night."
It wasn't heartburn.
I could feel it from where I stood. A great tired muscle laboring behind his ribs. A narrowed place, deep inside, where his blood had to squeeze through like water through a clogged pipe. It wasn't today. It wasn't tomorrow. But it was soon. It was coming for him the way winter comes, slow and certain.
I set the coffee down. I rested my hand on his shoulder for a moment, as if to steady myself.
"Gary," I said. "Maybe skip the onions."
Warmth. Spreading. Patient.
By the time he left, his color was better. He tipped me five dollars on an eleven-dollar check and said he felt like a new man. I watched him climb into his truck through the front window and pull out onto Main Street, and I hugged myself so hard it hurt.
* * *
A little girl named Lily, six years old, with a fever so high her cheeks were scarlet, sitting limp in a booth while her mother tried to get her to eat a few bites of toast. I brought her a cup of ice chips and brushed her damp hair off her forehead, and by the time her mother paid, Lily was bouncing on the vinyl seat, demanding pancakes.
A teenage boy with a cast on his wrist, wincing every time he picked up his fork. I reached across him to refill his water, and my fingers brushed the cast. Two days later he came in without it, and told his friends loudly that the X-ray had been "totally wrong, the doctor said it was like it never broke."
The old woman with the cane, the one from the Walmart aisle. She came in for pie one afternoon, and I recognized her ache before I recognized her face. When I helped her into her booth, I let my hand rest on her hip a moment longer than I should have. She left without the cane. I found it later, propped by the door, forgotten.
And the man in the alley.
He was there on a Wednesday night when I took the trash out. A thin man in a dirty army jacket, sitting with his back against the brick beside the dumpster, out of the rain. Forties, maybe. Hard to tell. His beard was gray in patches, and his eyes were sunken, and his left forearm was wrapped in a filthy bandage that smelled of infection even from across the alley.
He looked up at me, wary as a stray dog.
"I'm not doing anything," he said. "Just getting out of the wet."
"Are you hungry?" I asked.
He stared at me.
I brought him a plate from the kitchen. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, whatever Manny hadn't sold. He ate it with his good hand, shoveling it in, watching me the whole time. When he was done, I knelt down in front of him and asked to see his arm.
"Why?" he asked.
"I worked in a... clinic," I said. My face went hot. "Before."
He let me unwrap the bandage. Underneath, the cut was long and ragged and swollen, the skin around it shiny and red, and the infection was in his blood already. I could feel it running through him, hot and hungry. A week, maybe two, and it would kill him, quietly, out here in some alley where no one would notice until it was too late.
His name was not on any Writ. I would have bet my life on that.
I rewrapped his arm with clean gauze from the first-aid kit in the kitchen. I held it a while between my hands. "Keep it clean," I told him.
He looked down at the arm. Then up at me, with an expression I couldn't read.
"Ray," he said. "Name's Ray."
"Eva," I said.
"Thanks, Eva." He got up, a little unsteady. He pulled his jacket tight and limped off down the alley into the dark, and I stood there in the rain for a long time, my palms tingling, feeling like I'd swallowed the sun.
* * *
Hollis Grant watched me.
I noticed it eventually. Every morning, seven o'clock, coffee black, two eggs over easy, rye toast, the crossword. I would fill his cup and help him with the long clues.
"Five letters," he'd say. "'Undeserved kindness.'"
"Mercy," I'd offer.
He tapped the squares. "Fits, but it doesn't work with the one going down."
"Charity?" I asked.
"Too many." He worked it out himself, eventually. "Grace," he said, very softly, and wrote it in.
And sometimes, when I looked up from across the room, from Gary's booth or Lily's table or the swinging door to the kitchen, Hollis would be looking at me over the top of his glasses. Not suspicious, exactly. Thoughtful. The way you look at a bird that's landed somewhere it shouldn't, and you aren't sure yet whether to shoo it away or hold very still so it stays.
He never said anything. Neither did I.
* * *
Sari said something.
It was the end of a long Friday. We were wiping down the counter, the chairs up on the tables, Manny gone home, Clay counting the register in the back. Sari had been quiet all evening, which was so unlike her that I'd started to feel uneasy.
"I saw Manny's hand," she said.
My rag stopped moving.
"When it happened. I was right there. It was bad, Eva. It was bubbling. I've seen burns. My mom's a nurse, I grew up in ERs. That hand should've been wrapped for a month." She kept wiping the counter. She wasn't looking at me. "And the next day it was fine."
"Maybe it wasn't as bad as—"
"Don't." She said it gently. "Please don't. You're a really bad liar."
I didn't say anything.
She finally looked up. Her eyes were serious, but they weren't angry. They were something else. Curious. Worried. Maybe a little afraid.
"I'm not asking," she said. "Okay? I'm not. I know you've been through stuff. I know you don't want to talk about it. And I'm not gonna push. I just—" She shook her head. "Whatever it is. Whatever you are. You've got good hands."
She tossed her rag in the bin, grabbed her keys, and pushed out through the front door. The bell rang behind her.
I stood alone in the empty diner with my good hands, and I didn't know if I wanted to laugh or cry.
So I went upstairs, and I lay in bed, and I counted them all instead. Manny. Gary. Lily. The boy with the wrist. The woman with the cane. Ray.
Six. Six people who were whole tonight because I'd jumped.
I fell asleep smiling.
I didn't know, yet, that I'd been counting the wrong things.